[Mike Nolan]

Great to see you posting, Cass, hopefully the changes I made to the site made it less onerous to log in.

[Mike Nolan]

No, I just did an egg wash, let it sit for a minute then sprinkled poppy seeds on.

I've got one or two other ideas to try, I may do a followup experiment the next time I make hot dog buns. (We've been eating a lot of hot dogs lately because I made a big batch of tomato relish last week and it is SO GOOD on hot dogs when it's fresh!)

My wife agrees with me that other than the oil version, they all had the seeds stuck down fairly well.

There really isn't much honey in the honey wash, I couldn't taste it on the bun I had for supper. (I had one from the honey group and one from the oil group, seeds kept falling off as I was eating the latter, so that method is a total failure.)

[Mike Nolan]

The first Costco in Lincoln will be opening near us next month, so we just joined. We went to the one in LaVista last weekend, no KAF flour there, the 25 pound bags were the Kirkland 'house brand', bleached and brominated, I think. They did have an unbleached flour in two-packs of 10 pound bags, I don't remember whose, but it wasn't KAF.

The only NY Bakers I can find online is in San Diego, I thought you lived on the east coast, Aaron.

I have ordered a few things from walmart.com, including a pail of wheat berries, I haven't seen any problems with shipments, but I haven't ordered bags of flour that way. I've never had any problems with broken items when I ordered from KAF, but I did have a bag of pastry flour missing from an order. They shipped a replacement when I called. I don't think I've ordered anything larger than a 2 pound bag of flour from KAF.

I don't know if Kroger has any stores in Nebraska, definitely none in Lincoln. We have Hy Vee, a regional chain based in Iowa, and Super Saver/Russ's, an even smaller chain based in Lincoln.

[Mike Nolan]

Bread is often commodity-priced. If there are two types of 'white bread' on the shelf, one at $1.25 and one at $2.95, many people will buy the lower priced one, regardless of their perception of quality and taste. Those of us who make our own bread know that there aren't very many shortcuts to making cheaper bread, except to use cheaper ingredients or more chemicals to increase the shelf life.

There used to be an Old Home 'day old' shop near us, but it closed. I think there may still be one on the north side of town.

The homeless shelters and food pantries usually have lots of bread, what they often don't have is stuff to put on that bread or serve with it.

Two of the grad students in Agronomy and Horticulture are running a research experiment this summer with tomatoes, they have 10 rows of them, each 160 feet long. That's a LOT of tomatoes! (One day they picked, weighed and graded over 1000 pounds of them.) They've been donating a bunch of them to the food pantry, but there's a limit to how much fresh food they can handle at a time, because it spoils on their shelves just like it spoils on ours.

[Mike Nolan]

Try this link:
Bread Article

Small packages nearly always cost a LOT more than bigger ones, whether that's flour or toothpaste. That's why I was hoping to have my son pick up a 50 pound bag of first clear flour, because it's only about 3X the cost of a 2 pound bag from KAF. (Shipping it would cost far more than the flour, but I may wind up doing that anyway.)

Recently the local WalMart only has KAF AP flour, not the bread flour, and at around $4.25 for a five-pound bag, which is higher than the price at Hy-Vee, where it is currently $3.99.

The only place I've seen a 10 pound bag of KAF flour (other than at the KAF store) was at a Whole Foods in Omaha, the one in Lincoln only has the 5 pound bag.

FWIW, the purchase of Whole Foods by Amazon seems likely to affect the entire food industry. But what's going to happen is that products (and possibly entire lines or companies) will disappear completely. Instead of 75 or 100 different types of bread (counting buns, donuts, etc), there may only be 50-60. At a store recently, I counted nearly a dozen types and brands of hot dog buns.

I've already seen several Heinz products go off the market, and a Frito-Lay rack jobber told me the other day that they no longer make 'plain' Doritos, because they have a dozen or more flavored versions to stock.

So be careful what you ask for, you might get it.

[Mike Nolan]

Thanks all, it was a pretty good day. The Veal Zurich was excellent (on spaetzle) and the pie was a great dessert. My older son called and we had a good chat, the younger one has been absorbed into the Googlesphere again, but will be joining us for Christmas.

[Mike Nolan]

You have to give the water method time to let the seeds soak up water and anneal themselves to the dough, If I remember to do it, I will put the seeds on about half way through final proof.

Egg seems to work best at sticking seeds down, although the upside-down final proof method generally works fairly well for me. A bunch of seeds usually fall off as you flip the loaves over, so it's a bit wasteful of seeds before the loaves even go in the oven.

Been a while since I toured an industrial-scale commercial bakery, but I think they use a spray to hold the seeds on, applying them as the loaves come out of the oven.

I lived in Chicago for about 10 years and grew up in NW Illinois, so a hot dog bun just isn't right if it doesn't have poppy seeds on it. But here in Nebraska the only seeded hot dog and burger buns have sesame seeds on them.

I prefer Challah without seeds on it.

[Mike Nolan]

I knew a guy who made applejack from apples that grew on his farm. He'd let the jug sit out in the winter and after it froze he'd chop through the ice to pour off the fermented applejack, it had a REAL kick by then!

Local legend had it that his trees and some others in Jo Daviess County were the descendants of ones planted by John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed), but the Johnny Appleseed historians have no record of him ever having visited NW Illinois, where I grew up.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

The apple pie was excellent, if you see Apollo apples, I can report that they're good pie apples. We did up the amount of lemon juice in the recipe, they're not as tart as many pie apples are, so it needed a little boost.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making Veal Zurich (it's similar to a Stroganoff but with a cream/white wine sauce) for supper today to celebrate my birthday.

[Mike Nolan]

I just took an apple pie out of the oven, I'm having that instead of birthday cake today.

[Mike Nolan]

How high are the feet? I usually just put a dishtowel under a cutting board that slides around. (I've got a big 18x24 hard plastic one that I use for large projects.) Or you can use the stuff you line drawers with or put in between dishes to keep them from getting scratched, it's also slightly tacky.

[Mike Nolan]

I know there are some u-pick orchards in western Ohio (somewhere around Toledo), I see them every time we drive down I-80 to visit our son in Pittsburgh, but we're never making that trip during apple season, so we've never stopped there. Not sure how far away that is from where you are, there may be better options in Michigan or Indiana.

[Mike Nolan]

Butchers have been using wood surfaces for cutting meat for a long time, but they wash them down frequently (with chlorine bleach these days) and then scrape it dry. You can tell a really old butcher block because the surface isn't perfectly flat anymore from having been scraped so many times.

But I don't cut raw meat directly on my butcher block countertops, either. I use a plastic mat that can be washed in the dishwasher.

[Mike Nolan]

I've used Macintosh, it's OK but not my favorite pie apple. I bought a few pounds of Apollo apples at the farmer's market today, not a variety I'm familiar with. The wiki chart Apples says it is an eating apple, but it says that about Winesap, too, and I know it is a great pie apple. I tried eating one, I think it'll be a better pie apple than an eating apple. So I'll be making an apple pie tomorrow. (Pie dough is made and resting in the fridge overnight.)

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